An enormously popular writer of horror fiction for the past 40 years, Stephen King has more recently begun to attract significant critical attention as well. After collecting numerous Bram Stoker Awards, Locus Awards, and World Fantasy Awards, in 2003 he received the National Book Foundation's Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.
In this excerpt from an article that first appeared in Playboy magazine in 1981, King examines the causes and effects of an experience that points, he says, to the "insanity" inside us all.
From "Why We Crave Horror Movies"*
by Stephen King
When we pay our four or five bucks and seat ourselves at tenth-row center in a theater showing a horror movie, we are daring the nightmare.
Why? Some of the reasons are simple and obvious. To show that we can, that we are not afraid, that we can ride this roller coaster.
Which is not to say that a really good horror movie may not surprise a scream out of us at some point, the way we may scream when the roller coaster twists through a complete 360 or plows through a lake at the bottom of the drop. And horror movies, like roller coasters, have always been the special province of the young; by the time one turns 40 or 50, one’s appetite for double twists or 360-degree loops may be considerably depleted.
We also go to reestablish our feelings of essential normality; the horror movie is innately conservative, even reactionary. Freda Jackson as the horrible melting woman in Die, Monster, Die! confirms for us that no matter how far we may be removed from the beauty of a Robert Redford or a Diana Ross, we are still light-years from true ugliness.
And we go to have fun.
Ah, but this is where the ground starts to slope away, isn’t it? Because this is a very peculiar sort of fun, indeed. The fun comes from seeing others menaced--sometimes killed. One critic has suggested that if pro football has become the voyeur’s version of combat, then the horror film has become the modern version of the public lynching.
Selected Works by Stephen King
•The Shining, novel (1977)
•The Stand, novel (1978/1990)
•Pet Sematary, novel (1983)
•Dolores Claiborne, novel (1993)
•On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, nonfiction (2000)
•From a Buick 8, novel (2002)
•11/22/63, novel (2011)
•Joyland, novel (2013)
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The Bazaar of Bad Dreams, short stories (2015)
* "Why We Crave Horror Movies," by Stephen King, was first published in Playboy magazine, January 1981. The article has been reprinted in several essay anthologies, including The Bedford Guide for College Writers With Reader (2010).